Old Stuff

I know you can pick up a pretty decent drive, in terms of performance and capacity, for about £45, but say I was happy to make do with a lower specificiation, either below 20Gb, or maybe ATA66, or perhaps even a 5400 rpm ?

Search the usual suspects and you just get leading edge tech, and around £35-40 seems to be the low end price. Does anyone know of a place that sells "trailing edge" technology for a better price ? There must be thousands of older unsold disk units hanging around somewhere that someone would like to make a return on.

As mookie and Xavier have highlighted, there tends to be not much demand for 'low end' drives, at least not in the main retail and online outlets. The cost per gigabyte of storage is now so low that the cutting back on other features (RPM etc) to save costs tends not to be done.

Personally, as Xavier has actually highlighted, I really like the Western Digital 40Gb Special Edition hard-drives with 8Mb cache (WD400JB). They're identical to their bigger brothers (80Gb models are particular popular) and provide excellent quality, speed and value for money.

If you really want a low-end drive, then perhaps eBay more obscure online stores may be able to provide for your needs.